Congress Won’t Even Look at Obama’s Latest Budget

Eric Ueland, a staff member with the Senate Budget Committee, stands behind copies of U.S. President Barack Obama's Fiscal Year 2017 Budget in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016. Photograph by Bloomberg via Getty Images

When President Barack Obama sends his final budget to Congress Tuesday, it will fall on deaf ears.

The Republican-controlled House and Senate budget committees jointly broke with tradition in announcing that they would not even listen to the details of the Obama administration plan. The director of the Office of Management and Budget, Shaun Donovan, was not invited to testify about the administration’s plan, according to a joint House and Senate press release.

“Rather than spend time on a proposal that, if anything like this Administration’s previous budgets, will double down on the same failed policies that have led to the worst economic recovery in modern times, Congress should continue our work on building a budget that balances and that will foster a healthy economy,” Georgia Representative and chair of the House Budget Committee Tom Price said in the release.

Democrats have widely criticized the Republican decision to snub Obama’s lame duck budget. Democratic members of the House and Senate Budget Committees wrote letters to their chairmen criticizing the decision. According to the letters, the House Budget Committee has given a hearing to presidential budgets every year since 1975; the Senate Budget Committee has never denied a presidential budget hearing in its history.